In 2020, the United Nations Development Programme and the University of Oxford surveyed 1.2 million people from 50 countries about climate change. The survey found that 72 percent of respondents in high-income countries believed in climate change and 72 percent of respondents in Western Europe and North America believed climate change to be a global emergency. In fact, only four percent of American respondents believed that no action should be taken against climate change. This widespread belief in and support for climate change action would suggest that the majority of the American public is pushing for climate action in salient ways, but this is not the case. This is especially important when considering the younger generations.
Generation Z—those born between 1996 and 2012—are coming into adulthood now when climate change is escalating at an unprecedented rate. It is imperative that science communicators, organizers, and politicians integrate current research into efforts to motivate Gen Z to take climate change action, as this generation will be the one coming into leadership age and position just as the crisis is projected to reach its peak.
Gen Z has the highest awareness of and social media interaction with climate change, though by a small margin. This generation blames businesses more for climate change and are more willing to give up fossil fuel use. Only 24% of all US adults have engaged in some sort of climate change action in the past year, but Gen Z was the highest of this group, making up 32%. However, Gen Z has a difficult time recognizing climate change’s health effects, showing that perhaps to them, climate change does not seem to be the all-encompassing issue that it is. Another main factor contributing to how younger generations treat climate change is a lack of hope, but that “constructive” hope, or hope that asked participants to adopt specific actions to hinge that hope on, was positively correlated with pro-environmental behavior.
There are two specific studies that provide the basis for my research. Ariestya et al. (2022) studied Gen Z and found that conative awareness, or awareness that provided the basis for pro-environmental behavior, was the least likely type of awareness in Gen Z, regardless of how they framed the issue. Ettinger et al. (2021) studied climate change communication through a video medium and found no change in willingness to act in either a fear framing or hope framing.
My study combines these two studies and provides something new, focusing on the medium of climate change communication that Gen Z is exposed to. The research question I asked is whether or not visual or written communication is more effective in promoting willingness to act on climate change in Gen Z. Given that Gen Z is a digital generation, I hypothesized that visual communication would be more effective.
To study this, I surveyed members of Gen Z at four locations: Indiana University, Bloomington North High School, Indiana State University, and Lake Central High School. Participants were randomly given either a video to watch or article to read concerning climate change which was chosen based on what previous literature suggests about effective climate change communication. To measure willingness to act, participants were asked to answer how likely they were to do five climate change actions on a scale from 0 to 100 before and after exposure. These actions were: posting on social media, talking to friends and family, pursuing a career, voting for politicians and policies, and volunteering for climate change-oriented organizations. From there, I took each individual’s post-exposure action score and pre-exposure action score and found their difference. This is called a change score, and these scores are what I used to analyze my data.
Descriptively, the article actually promoted a higher average change score, but a t-test found that there was no significant difference between the groups. The scatterplot shows all change scores separated by exposure. There are a few outliers on the article side that skewed the average change score for that group. The total average change score was 4.15. This seems to be a small amount of change, but it is higher than the Ettinger et al. (2021) study found. Furthermore, even incremental positive change is good change.
Willingness to post on social media about climate change had the highest change score at 6.27, while willingness to volunteer had the lowest at 2.21. This makes sense given that most any person is more likely to want to post on social media than volunteer, and these scores are both still positive overall. Post-exposure qualitative responses highlighted that while participants found the exposure interesting and informative, the depressing nature of the content made them feel hopeless.
Future research should study this process across other states and with larger populations to either confirm or deny my results. Replications of this study could also use different content and see if the outcome is the same.
Just as I found in my qualitative responses and in previous research, hope is very effective when communicating climate change. And, right now, we aren’t communicating that effectively. But, there is hope to be found. There are dozens of historical examples of systemic change made by people, not government or industry or royalty. No matter how dire the situation may seem, we have the power to change our lives if we decide we want to. Communicating that sentiment to my generation might seem like an insurmountable challenge, but I believe that once we are able to effectively communicate hope associated with climate change, we can make the world a livable place for ourselves, our children, and all those we share this planet with.
Maisie Westerfield is a senior at the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs.
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